Russian TV Host Fired After Coming Out During Live Broadcast

Anton Krasovsky, a host and editor-in-chief of the Kremlin-backed KontrTV, came out during a broadcast Friday night. "I’m gay, and I’m just the same person as you, my dear audience, as President Putin, as Prime Minister Medvedev and the deputies of our Duma," Kravosky said.

Kravosky tells CNN that he was given the pink slip shortly after the broadcast.

"I have made a lot of money in television and I understood that I’d lose everything," he said about his decision to go forward with coming out. "But I also understood that I couldn’t do anything else. I didn’t do it so that I would get hundreds of likes on my Facebook page. I did it because I wanted them to hear it in the Kremlin. And they heard it, and were surprised."

Video of his coming out announcement has been deleted from KontrTV's website and YouTube.

He has clearly done this in a time when his country needs people like him speaking out to the public. What he did was probably extremely difficult and should be appreciated. If I were living in Russia, seeing this would give me hope. Good for him.

Folks need to understand that RUSSIA is a very conservative country sexually speaking...although women's rights were fought for from the mid-19th century on and were a part of the revolutionary movements, woman's right to sexual enjoyment was not really talked about and certainly did not penetrate the Orthodox church. It is she (the Orthodox who are in bed with the Politicians and I imagine that it is that power that is calling for man woman relationships only....

It is not a choice. Put me with a sexy, attractive woman and my genitalia does not function. Put me with a sexy man and my body reacts with desire, blood rushing to the area, ready to engage. Yes, I am a gay man. Not by choice.

People....what is the rage? I did not say anything about choice...what I did say was that one should look into the roots of the prejudice and that that I believed that it was tied not only to Orthodoxy but also to a sexually staid Soviet morality...where there has not been the freedom to talk about sexuality as has emerged in the West...I would offer that Russia's being in between cultures of the West and East (including Muslim) have made a different climate; that being said: check this article out...interviews with gays in Russia:

Lighten up people, who cares when he came out, the mere fact that he came out publicly and to such a huge audience is in itself both an act of heroism and exemplary behaviour in raising awareness that he is a human being entitled to the same rights as anyone else! Heroism given the patent state of homophobic behaviour and attitudes and outright violence against LGBT people in Russia! So fact checking about the date of his coming out is irrelevant and any insistence on this type of fact checking is, in my opinion, rather pompous! I agree with Thomas: amazing and courageous!

This is awful- and was awful when it happened- I see Scama's point: misleading or mistaken facts in LGBT support sites during this tumultuous time do under cut the importance of what the supporters are trying to say, the facts speak for themselves and shouldn't be rearranged, any loss of credibility is a risk not worth taking.

This man is a hero, and his courage and example are inspirational, and I can only hope it serves to bring the condemned Russian LGBT community hope and pide.

You've republished a 'news story' with erroneous facts & it's pompous to point it out? They didn't argue that he got fired for coming out (the point of the story), merely that it wasn't a knee-jerk, sudden reaction by the network.

Maybe I just read aggression into the curtness of the comment. Perhaps I'm too suspicious. It's easy to doubt a commenter's motives when no links were given, and a relatively trivial detail is portrayed as a story-ruining hole.

If there was anyone seeing that show who didn't know he was gay, he was coming out to them.

I'm not completely up on the timeline of Russian anti-gay legislations, but denying a "knee-jerk reaction" is irrrelevant, if this legislation was enacted after his first coming out. Restating his sexuality under the new oppressive laws was a braver, and more important, coming out.